News: National Park Service Faces Challenge of Instituting a History Park for Reconstruction

President Obama declared five new national monuments
Thursday, ranging from a Birmingham, Ala., church bombed by
segregationists to the coniferous forests of Oregon. He has now used his
executive authority more than any other president to protect iconic
historic, cultural and ecological sites across the country.

Three
new monuments in the South, all of which have bipartisan support,
exemplify Obama’s push to expand America’s shared national identity
through the narrative it tells with its public lands. Two of them, in
Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., were sites of violent acts perpetrated
against African American children and an interracial group of civil
rights activists. The third, in Beaufort, S.C., commemorates the period
between the Civil War and the push for segregation in the 1890s when
freed slaves worked to establish schools and communities of their own.

In
a statement, Obama noted that the monuments “preserve critical chapters
of our country’s history” and reflect his long-standing effort to
“ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully
reflective of our nation’s diverse history and culture.”

Northwestern University history professor Kate Masur, who
pushed for designation along with University of California at Davis
history professor Gregory Downs, said in an email that the site will
illuminate “one of the most important and most misunderstood eras of our
past.”

“The Reconstruction era was the nation’s first
effort to grapple with slavery’s lasting impact, when millions of former
slaves began forging lives in freedom, and when the nation remade the
Constitution to better protect citizenship and individual rights,” she
said.

Top Image: brick church stands in the Penn Center
historic site on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. The center, the
site of one of the nation's first schools for freed slaves, on Thursday
was designated as a new national monument. (Bruce Smith/AP)Bottom Image: Map of Beaufort, SC designated sites.